Sunday, May 31, 2009

Learn To Fly is a distance objective flash game where it is your objective to throw a penguin as far as you can. Normally these games are over fairly quickly as you can only control the start angle of the object and clicking at the right time on a rapidly moving slider controls thrust, but Learn To Fly is quite different.

In LTF the game starts out with your penguin only being able to Bellyflop off the end of a ramp, but soon you can afford a glider that increases the range of movement, then a rocket and at that point a level of strategy is introduced as the player then starts to learn the interaction between speed, altitude, angle and air resistance.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Everytime I see this or something similar, a part of me screams in disgust. But it is ok, really, I am fine with it, for now, but come the revolution, THEY WILL ALL PAY!

On a more serious note, I have wondered if there is anything special about English that makes it so universal. A quick Google resulted in an interesting piece by Wendy Wang from China:

Because countries like US, British, Canada, Australia, etc are of powerful economy. Some of them even are of strong military power. Any a country wants to develop their economy or cooperate with these countries in military has to know English, or how could they communicate with these countries?Besides, History proves that the country of strong economy is sure to have a great cultural influence. Due to the overwhelming economic power of US, American music, movies, TV programmes, even Mc Donald's, KFC are spread all over the world and attract youth throughout the world Which motivate many people especially youth to study English.PPL say we are living in a global village nowadays. On one hand English is accelerating the process of global village, because ppl can communicate with each other in English. On the other hand, Global Village is making english an obligation to the ppl who want to integrate into the present global village. For example, open the website you will find the vast majority of websites are written in English, so how could it possible if you don't know English?

Sunday, May 17, 2009

There are some websites that I instantly bookmark when I see them and then rarely visit. One of them is the fonts websites DaFont probably has the best fonts collection site out there. These aren't fonts for reading, but more fonts to play with. They have a great video game section, movie section and even a food/drink section with fonts such as the CokaCola and PES fonts.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

James Rolfe, better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd is a big movie buff and has done a retrospective review of the Star Wars films. I like James have seen them a lot throughout my life, but he mentions a few things in the first part of his review that I never realised before. I always knew that Star Wars followed a very classic Hero/Villain story, but I never knew how much of a melting pot of classic archetypes it was. So worth a watch.

In relation to James' comment on the optimum order to watch the films in, I think it has been well established now that watching them in the order they where filmed, results in a better first viewing.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

I felt like I needed to comment on This BBC News Post about America's national computer security. It is full of statements like "we need leadership" and "it is upto industry to provide better solutions". Well the truth is, and has been for many years now, that industry and governments have all the solutions to protect their data and their users, but are too lazy to implement them properly. The tools that help organisations sleep at night are:

The final two are not the kind of thing home users can implement, but the rest are good things for everybody to know about, and should be implemented on every computer on the planet. Why there are still organisations and governments floundering over IT security annoys me as it is not rocket science.